This post will be about my week 1 documentation while transcribing “To Be Preserved": The Correspondence of James A. Garfield.

Training time was about 1 hour 23 minutes

I started by first reading the “Let’s Get Started” and reviewing the instructions. Afterwards I created an account (which did give me some trouble since apparently when logging in you need to enter your email address and not your username even though it says enter username or email address, so that did trip me up for a minute or two) and then looked at the transcriptions and reviewed the basic rules. Following that I opened the campaign section and explored the numerous campaigns before deciding on the 20^th president of the United States James A. Garfield and his series of papers. I did see a sheet music campaign that did look interesting, but after looking it  seemed the papers were already perfectly legible and didn’t need any transcriptions, so I went back to James A. Garfield. I decided to start with Vol 14 and amazed of how I could barely even make letters out in those pages; hard to believe he’s writing in a form of the English language.

Brief reflection:

Originally for some reason my thoughts regarding this project were that it was going to be pretty hard and tough, but now after going through this week’s things I’m starting to think it might not be so bad after all. I changed my attitude on how I looked at this project; instead of dreading it I don’t mind it much now. I’m not sure how well transcribing the 19^th century cursive is going to go; even with the tools the website gives me it’s going to be challenging to say the least. I hope to learn and read more about his time in the union during the civil war and his time during presidency.

Goals:

As far as my 2 goals go, for me educational one: to understand more about his life during the civil and presidency. For my personal goal that’s to get good and reading and interpreting mid-19^th century cursive.

Time logged: 76 minutes

Tasks completed:

This week I start to really dig into the letters wrote and sent to James A. Garfield. The tasks I completed were:

·       Log into the library of congress

·       Select the “To Be Preserved": The Correspondence of James A. Garfield campaign

·       Clicked on needs review

·       Chose series 4 vol 84 1880

·       Began reviewing several pages of letters sent to the president

Brief reflection:

Honestly at first when I was glancing over some of these writings last week I thought to myself that there’s no way I would be able to transcribe this writing style, but after really focusing for just a bit I realized it might not be as difficult as I originally thought. It still was difficult though, so that’s why I decided to go with reviewing instead; helps me catch any difficulties I would have encountered if I transcribed, and I get to read a complete document. I expected this campaign to be full of mundane boring government matters, so I was not expecting to find letters from an African American to the president about the state of the politics in the state of Virginia. It was pretty interesting seeing the black man ask the president directly for advice and potentially voting against his party for the sake of advancing equality for the blacks. What I learned about myself today was that I can read some of these things I thought impossible if I really put my mind to it and focus. The DSLP showed me how much info and history we have stored in libraries and backed up forever online. Some new thoughts and ideas  are now telling me I should look for more letters and documents that relate to the political state of nation as well of the treatment of Blacks during this post-reconstruction era.

tasks completed:

• logged onto the library of congress

• continued reviewing documents

Brief reflection:

So, I’ve been doing this for 3 weeks now and I have to say the way I originally went into this is very different than my opinions on it right now. These archives of transcripts I’ve been reviewing have been more interesting than I could have imagined. When I think of the 1800s or any time at more than 200 years ago, I can only see images in black and white. but you know after reading these letters and documents from that time I have come to imagine it less black and white and more so how I see color now. It’s different from reading a history textbook because I got to see how they wrote and how they talked to one another ;it was pretty surprising to me  how much you can learn about a time period just from one letter or government note. Transcribing though was as hard as it always has been I thought that by now I would be pretty competent at it, but the style of cursive these documents have been written in changes every other page it feels like.  That being said with patience, very careful reading, and the handy review system I’ve been able to make it through.